The known resistance of perfluoroelastomers to high temperatures and aggressive chemicals makes these materials particularly suitable for demanding environments such as aircraft engines and oil drilling equipment. Because of the exceptional stability of perfluoroelastomers in their cured state, fabricated articles are typically formed from the polymers in their uncured state, and then subsequently cured. For example, in the fabrication of O-rings, the perfluorinated copolymer, as appropriately compounded, is formed into a ring of the required dimensions and subsequently cured and post-cured.
The stability of such perfluoroelastomers, while providing desirable performance characteristics in demanding environments, makes further processing difficult. While some techniques have been developed for laminating sheets of cured perfluoroelastomer to substrates such as metal, satisfactory techniques have heretofore not been available for bonding the cured perfluoroelastomer to itself. Such bonding techniques would be useful for preparing laminates of two perfluoroelastomers having somewhat different characteristics. More importantly, however, such a bonding technique would permit the preparation of O-rings from rod stock, rather than preparing a separate mold for each size of ring that might be desired.